Hong Kong Phooey is a 16-episode (31 shorts) Hanna-Barbera animated series that first aired on ABC Saturday morning from September 7, 1974 to September 4, 1976. The star, Hong Kong Phooey, is the secret alter ego of Penrod Pooch, or Penry (sometimes mispronounced “Henry”), a “mild-mannered” police station janitor. Although Penry/Phooey appears to be the only anthropomorphic dog in the entire city where the series is set, no one ever connects his two identities.
Hong Kong Phooey is supposedly a master of kung fu and other martial arts. The stories begin at the police headquarters, where Hong Kong Phooey’s alter ego, Penry, works as a mild-mannered janitor. He works with Sergeant Flint (Sarge) and Rosemary, the telephone operator, who has a major crush on Hong Kong Phooey. After Rosemary gets a call and explains the criminals’ crime Penry would run into a filing cabinet to transform himself into Hong Kong Phooey. In each episode, he ends up needing help from his loyal (somewhat less anthropomorphic) striped cat and sidekick, Spot, to get him out. Hong Kong never quite notices Spot’s help, but instead is always proud of himself because he thinks he is the one who does everything.
Phooey would get into his Phooeymobile and would use the “bong of the gong” to turn it into whatever sort of vehicle best suited the occasion. He would find the thieves committing their crime. Mostly, Spot was the one who found a way to capture the criminals and foil their crime, but on occasion Hong Kong Phooey captures the villain on his own through sheer dumb luck. But because Hong Kong was the reputed superhero, every time Spot would save the day, everyone else (including Phooey) credited Hong Kong Phooey with being the hero. Every episode would end with a return to police headquarters, where Penry would usually have some sort of accident that would cause Sarge to yell at him. Still, Penry was never hurt by Sarge’s yelling but would find a way to compliment himself on his incognito crime-fighting prowess as Spot sighed.
A running gag was that Hong Kong Phooey was such a respected hero that, when his incompetence caused him to crash into, harm, or otherwise inconvenience a civilian, the passerby would declare what an honor it was to have so interacted with “the great Hong Kong Phooey.” On one occasion, for example, he drove the Phooeymobile through some wet cement, splattering the workers, who said that it was an honor to have a whole day’s work ruined by “the great Hong Kong Phooey.”
// Update the values for the next time a gesture happens
width *= e.scale;
height *= e.scale;
rotation = (rotation + e.rotation) % 360;
}
Some readers might have noticed that a gesture is just a prettier way of looking at touch events. It’s completely true, and if you don’t handle things properly, you can end up with some odd behavior. Remember to keep track of what’s currently happening in a page, as you’ll probably want to let one of these two operations “win†when they come in conflict.
Anson Parker has created Domize another in the line of Ajax domain utilities. Here is what Anson had to say about it:
It is the fastest as-you-type
domain name look-up tool for web and iPhone users. Queries are
encrypted over SSL for security and privacy. Domize is really head and
shoulders above its peers in allowing you to quickly scout out an
available name.
It also has some cool innovations. The entire site is delivered in one
request for non-IE visitors ("data:" urls for images) and additional
functionality is only brought in after the page load (e.g. Google
Analytics). I used a cool technique to modify the stylesheet at the
bottom of the page through JavaScript and keep the whole thing valid
strict xhtml.
Domize also offers preview thumbnails of unavailable domains, which is
a great help in seeing "neighbors" of the domain you're interested in
as well as letting you quickly see whether a domain is owned by a
squatter or legitimate site.
With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.
Pencil will always be free and can run on virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 supports.
Always good to see people using the power of XUL that still has features that I hope to see HTML get.
Our Signal takes Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and Hacker News and creates a full page cloud visualization using jQuery.
The size of the box reflects the popularity, and the color lets you know the acceleration of that popularity. If the color is warm, it is on the rise, and vice versa for cool colors.
I like seeing alternative visualizations, but I have to admit I am not a huge fan of tag cloud style views. You?
Ever since Macromedia and Adobe merged, we have been waiting for a day where PDF and Flash played really nice together, and today is the day. Very symbolic for the folks from the companies before the merge.
As TechCrunch says:
At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop apps. the big news here is that for the first time, Adobe’s PDF-creating desktop software will supports Flash. So people can now create documents with embedded Flash movies from YouTube, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex framework—the same programming tool they use to create Web applications.
PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents. Best of all, they no longer take forever to load. The next step is for Adobe to make it easy to turn any PDF into a Web page, and vice versa.
This is the biggest news for me. Acrobat.com itself is a very nice integration of Buzzword, ConnectNow, PDF, and Share. It feels quite snappy (despite the "loading..."), and there are a lot of nice animations of course. A good showcase for Flex.
One of the examples that Ben and I give in our State of Ajax talk at Google I/O today revolves around form history.
We were thinking about the case for Undo on the Web that Aza Raskin is proposing and it got us thinking about the usage patterns of form data.
An example that got me was the Address Book application on the Mac. I find myself storing past addresses in the general "Notes" section at the bottom, but what if history was built into the system so I could go back in time? This could be a nice metaphor in general that goes beyond undo.
I took this use case and put together a working example that uses Gears to store the history locally so it can be speedy through the history.
The slider component comes from Script.aculo.us, and you can check out all of the code.
In the video below I show the application in action and then do a quick code walk through:
This is just the beginning of course. A slider if fun, but it would probably be more usable if it was simply left and right arrows that click through the versions, or at least putting tacks onto the slider.
An open source set of tools for persistence and distributed computing using intuitive standards-based JSON interfaces of HTTP REST, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, and HTTP Channels. The core of the Persevere project is the Persevere Server. The Persevere server includes a Persevere JavaScript client, but the standards-based interface is intended to be used with any framework or client.
The Persevere Server is an object storage engine and application server
(running on Java/Rhino) that provides persistent data storage of dynamic
JSON data in an interactive server side JavaScript environment. It is
currently in beta, and boasts a very solid feature set that should
interest JavaScript, Dojo and Ajax developers:
Create, read, update, and delete access to persistent data through
a standard JSON HTTP/REST web interface
Dynamic object persistence - expando objects, arrays, and
JavaScript functions can be stored, for extensive JavaScript persistence
support
Remote execution of JavaScript methods on the server through
JSON-RPC for a consistent client/server language platform
Flexible and fast indexed query capability through JSONPath
Comet-based data monitoring capabilities through HTTP Channels
with Bayeux transport plugin/negotiation support
Data-centric capability-based object level security with user
management, Persevere is designed to be accessed securely through Ajax
with public-facing sites
Comprehensive referencing capabilities using JSON referencing,
including circular, multiple, lazy, non-lazy, cross-data source, and
cross-site referencing for a wide variety of object structures
Data integrity and validation through JSON Schema
Class-based data hierarchy - typed objects can have methods,
inheritance, class-based querying
Pluggable data source architectures - SQL tables, XML files,
remote web services can be used as data stores
Service discovery through Service Mapping Description
